The Language Between Us
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6
The order came down at the end of September, though it took the better part of a week for word of it to travel through the ordinary channels and reach people like Anna, who had no wireless of her own and relied instead on Frau Brandt’s radio and the newspaper the widow brought back from town on market days. Non-fraternization, the announcement said, in the careful, bloodless language of military policy, was rescinded as of the first of October. American personnel were no longer prohibited from ordinary social contact with German civilians.
Frau Brandt read the notice aloud at the kitchen table, over coffee that was more chicory than coffee, and set the newspaper down with a look that told Anna the old woman had understood exactly what the notice meant to her, though neither of them said so directly.
“About time,” Frau Brandt said, which was the whole of her commentary, and returned to buttering a heel of bread as though the matter were settled.
It was not, in truth, quite so simple a thing as the widow’s brisk dismissal suggested. Anna had spent four months telling herself that the waiting was its own kind of test, a slow proof of whatever it was that had grown between herself and Larry across all those careful letters — that if it survived the distance and the rules and the uncertainty of whether the rules would ever lift at all, it would have earned the right to be trusted. But now that the test had ended, now that nothing stood between them but a train ticket and a Saturday afternoon, she found the waiting had done something else to her as well, something she hadn’t accounted for: it had let her build the moment up in her mind until she was no longer entirely sure any real afternoon could match it.
She said as much to Frau Brandt that evening, more honestly than she’d meant to, while they shelled the last of the season’s beans at the kitchen table.
“You’re worried he won’t be what the letters made him,” Frau Brandt said, not unkindly, in the flat, diagnostic way she said most things. “Or that you won’t be, to him, once there’s no camp and no war standing between you to make the whole thing feel like it matters more than it might, under ordinary circumstances.”
“Something like that.”
“Well.” The widow set down her bowl of beans and looked at Anna with an expression that was, for her, uncommonly gentle. “You’ll know soon enough. Better to know than to spend the rest of your life wondering, which is a poorer way to live than most people admit to themselves.” She returned to her beans, and did not raise the subject again, though Anna suspected the old woman’s uncharacteristic insistence on accompanying her to the station three days later had less to do with errands than with wanting to see the answer for herself.
Larry’s letter arrived four days later, shorter than his usual ones, as if the news itself had left him with less to say rather than more. Requesting leave for the weekend of the 12th, it read. CO’s already approved it — man’s got a soft spot for a soldier with somewhere worth going, even if he wouldn’t say it in so many words. Train gets into Erding a little after two on the Saturday. Tell me if that doesn’t suit, and I’ll find another way to get there that does.
It suited. Anna wrote back the same evening, three lines only, because anything longer felt like it would tip over into something she wasn’t yet ready to commit to paper, and spent the next eleven days in a state she recognized, with some discomfort, as nervousness of a kind she had not felt since she was a much younger woman standing at the edge of her own wedding, uncertain whether the life she was walking toward would resemble anything she had imagined for it.
She dressed with more care than she had allowed herself in months, on the Saturday, in a blue dress that had survived the war folded at the bottom of her pack through four years of moves and had not been worn since before Rolf’s death, on the reasoning, unexamined until this morning, that there had been nothing worth wearing it for. Heidi, dressed in her own best, a hand-me-down pinafore Frau Brandt had produced from some trunk of a granddaughter’s old clothes, seemed to sense the occasion’s weight without understanding its cause, and stood unusually still while Anna combed out her hair.
“We are meeting a friend,” Anna told her, which was true as far as it went, and did not attempt to explain further, because she did not yet have the words in either language for what she suspected this afternoon might turn out to be.
They walked to the station together, the three of them — Frau Brandt insisting, in her brisk way, on coming along under the thin pretext of an errand she could as easily have run any other day, though Anna suspected the real reason was some combination of curiosity and a widow’s protective instinct toward a young woman about to meet a man off a train. The platform was busier than Anna had expected for a small-town station on a Saturday afternoon, filled with the ordinary business of people arriving and departing, soldiers and civilians standing in loose proximity to each other in a way that would have been unthinkable, would have drawn stares and worse, only two weeks before.
The train arrived a few minutes past two, exactly as promised, and Anna watched the doors slide open and the passengers begin to disembark, a slow trickle of soldiers and civilians both, and felt her heart do something complicated and unfamiliar when she finally picked Larry out of the crowd — in civilian clothes rather than uniform, which struck her, for a moment, as strange enough to nearly keep her from recognizing him at all, a brown jacket and trousers that looked new, or at least newly worn, as if he’d bought them for the occasion and hadn’t yet grown fully comfortable in them.
He saw her at nearly the same moment, and whatever careful composure he’d worn through four months of letters seemed to leave him all at once, replaced by something unguarded that she had only glimpsed in pieces before now — at the truck, at the supply shed, in the handwriting that loosened partway through his letters — but had never seen the whole of, until this moment, on a train platform, in the ordinary afternoon light.
He crossed the platform quickly, weaving between the other passengers with the single-minded focus of a man who had rehearsed this walk a dozen times in his mind over the past eleven days and found, now that the moment had actually arrived, that none of the rehearsals had prepared him for how it would feel to close the last of the distance. He stopped a pace short of her, close enough that she could see the small scar above his eyebrow she’d never noticed in the camp’s harsher light, close enough that the platform’s noise seemed, for a moment, to recede into something background and unimportant.
“You came,” Anna said, which was a foolish thing to say, given that he was standing directly in front of her, but seemed, in the moment, to be the only thing her mind could produce.
“Said I would.” He looked, for a moment, as though he meant to say something more formal, some careful acknowledgment appropriate to the occasion and the small crowd of strangers around them, and then abandoned the impulse entirely and crouched instead in front of Heidi, who was regarding him with the frank, assessing stare of a child deciding whether a stranger could be trusted. “Hello there. You remember me?”
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